Playing poker online can help you avoid giving away body language clues

Today, the majority of people who enjoy playing games of poker and other casino games play online. There are so many advantages to playing online. You do not have to leave the house and travel to get to a venue, you do not have to devote a long period of time to playing if you do not want to. You do not even have to get dressed!

As well as the convenience and 24/7 nature of playing online at casino sites such as bgo, lucky247 and Mr Green Casino, there is also the fact that there is lots of free playing credit available. When you play online casino games at bgo, for example, you not only get a 200% bonus when you first sign up to play, you also get 180 free spins on one of the site’s most popular slots – Starburst. All the different sites offer great incentives to get new players to sign up. It is worth looking around and seeing what is available if you feel like joining a new site.

When your main game is poker, there are other advantages to playing online that you may not have considered. We all know about the fact that some players are good at wearing a ‘poker face’ when they play – the ability to not give away the relative strength of the hand they are playing through their neutral facial expression. If you do not have a good poker face, then playing online will be beneficial to you as the other players will not be able to gauge how you feel about the hand that you have.

And, apparently, that is not all that playing poker online could help to cover up. Research at Tufts University in the States showed that while some poker players might have the ability to mask a poor hand with a poker face, their poker arm can still give them away. So, what is a poker arm? According to the researchers, it is the way a player moves their arm when placing a bet during a round of poker.

Volunteers were asked to watch a series of two-second video clips which showed WSOP poker players placing their bets. The volunteers had to judge which players had good or bad hands. When shown the clips where the arm and hand of the player were visible, the volunteers in the study made far more accurate calls about the quality of the hand the player was holding than when watching the videos that showed only their upper body and face. When the arm and hand were not visible to the volunteers, their judgements were more guess-work than anything else, and produced random results in comparison.

According to the researchers, if a player is bluffing about their hand in poker, their arm movement becomes a lot less fluid and it is that which gives them away. Unlike a facial expression, the arm movement is more difficult to disguise, and so a poker arm is something that you cannot really develop. It is something to look out for on other players when you are playing face to face. However, one way to avoid being caught out by your poker arm is to play online so that other players will not pick up on that tremble in your hand as you attempt to bluff your way through a hand!